Assignment 14 - Open Assignment

This week was an open shoot. Each participant had the option to work on a prior assignment - make up a miss or re-do one that you want to improve - or to create a completely new image for your portfolio. I used this week as an opportunity to practice shooting products, particularly one that has a shiny surface…a bit of a re-do and a bit of a portfolio shot.

After kicking around a few ideas, I thought that our KitchenAid mixer would be a good subject. Rather than have a typical product shot, i.e., sitting on a white reflective table with a white background, I decided to give it some context. We were heading to dinner at my in-laws, so I volunteered to make a pumpkin pie. This would give me the opportunity to shoot the product with pie ingredients for the assignment, practice food photography with the pie, and not show up empty-handed for dinner…a trifecta!

I set everything up on the island in our kitchen, using a lighting set up used on the “shiny objects” assignment by another participant (see the Lighting diagram below if you’re interested). I started by shooting just the KitchenAid by itself, adding one light source at a time, and then adding the various props to see the effect each addition had on the scene. I had planned to blend a few images together in Photoshop – this essentially allows you to move the lighting around to get the right reflections on various parts of the shiny object and combining the best sections of each photo - however doing this requires that anything showing in the scene as well as the camera must stay in exactly the same spot. Not once, but twice, I bumped the table the mixer was sitting on and had to start over. UGH. Here is the final image:

After getting the shot, I blended the various ingredients into the mixer and made the pie. Once cooked, I added the cooked pie into the scene and took a few shots. Here is one of those:

My final shot was the cooked pie as the subject. I played around with various angles and props, but decided I preferred this one:

We headed to my in-laws that night with the pie in tow. I felt a little bit bad bringing a “used” pie to their house, but no one seemed to mind. I didn’t have any pie, but those who did enjoyed it!

Thanks for hanging in with me on my journey. The project is 25% complete…time flies! I’d love to get some feedback on what you like / don’t like with these posts, so please leave some comments below.

Next week is a subject near and dear to my photographic heart…an image to accompany an article on the growing Handmade economy.